Western sanctions haven't curbed Russian oil profits, but the green energy transition could

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Western sanctions haven't curbed Russian oil profits, but the green energy transition could     Western sanctions that put a price cap on Russian oil exports from December 2022 aimed to cause the country significant economic pain after its invasion of Ukraine last year. The idea was to curtail the amount Russia makes from its oil while ensuring it continues to flow into the global market to reduce price pressures on consumers around the world. Back then, oil prices were trading around US$80 (£66) per barrel (/bbl). More than 10 months later, the opposite has happened: Russian exports have declined but its revenues have increased, providing it with significant funds to continue the war. Continued here

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Reflections on hope during unprecedented violence in the Israel-Hamas war     On Yom Kippur in 1973, I was 6 years old and living in Petah Tikvah, a city in central Israel. Playing a nail-biting game of marbles, I initially ignored my mom calling me from our front porch. But sensing something was wrong, I gave up my potential winnings and ran home. I arrived to see my dad emerge from our front door wearing an Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, olive-green uniform. He hugged and kissed me goodbye. He then disappeared for nearly two weeks. Continued here

S3

A Stone Is a Story: An Illustrated Love Letter to Deep Time and Earth's Memory     We are denizens of an enormous pebble drifting through the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and beaches, bridges and kit… Continued here

S4

How much it costs to attend New York Comic Con     For four days every October, New York City resembles something out of a science fiction movie – people dressed in elabourate, head-turning costumes pepper Manhttan's West Side. These superheroes, winged creatures and anime characters are all on their way to New York Comic Con, the US east coast's massive ode to comic books and entertainment.The first New York Comic Con was held in 2006 with 33,000 attendees. Today, roughly 200,000 fans gather at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center, attending panels and swarming booths showcasing future releases in comics, video games and toys. Celebrity spottings are common: 2023's convention, which runs 12 to 15 October, will feature top names in entertainment, including Ewan McGregor and Chris Evans, who each played major characters in blockbuster films. Continued here

S6

Heurigen: Vienna's hyper-local wine taverns     Come warm weather, Vienna's residents flock to the city's bucolic outskirts with the determination of migrating birds. Their destinations? Heurigen, the rustic winery-run taverns showing off their aromatic white wines around wooden tables set under grape arbors and laden with traditional Austrian fare that might include schnitzel and blood sausage, always potato salad and ham and a variety of savory cheesy spreads to go with dark sourdough bread.Paris might have its bars du vin, Rome its enotecas. But Vienna's relationship to wine (and wine-friendly food) is unique. The Austrian capital is the only major European metropolis with a designated wine-growing area within its city limits, counting more than 600 producers on some 1,700 acres of vineyards. Continued here

S9

As Disney turns 100, the brand's real legacy is its business acumen     “100 Years of Wonder” is the theme for Disney’s year-long promotion of the company’s centenary. From special Disney on Ice events to a retrospective at the British Film Institute and limited edition Disney100 merchandise, Disney’s celebration is big business. The wonder and magic of Disney is consistently promoted. And yet I would argue that Disney’s greatest legacy is not its animated stories or characters, but the more mundane history of its mergers, acquisitions and intellectual property rights. Continued here

S43

15 Years Ago, an Iconic Sci-Fi Horror Game Redefined the Entire Genre     The early 2000s witnessed a boom in the survival horror game genre. Franchises like Silent Hill and Resident Evil promptly scratched the itch for immersive, nerve-wracking experiences that hinged on combat-friendly third-person perspectives with lore-heavy worlds that became more fleshed out with every installment. The inexplicable thrill of walking in the shoes of a protagonist compelled to survive amid challenging, hellish landscapes became the foundation for experimental gameplay mechanics, such as snapping photographs to defeat spirits in games like Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly.While the vignettes of survival horror eventually started to feel oversaturated, a gaping void still existed when it came to survival horror in space, an area that remained untapped despite its obvious potential. Entries like Alien: Resurrection prioritized first-person shooter mechanics over genre-specific narrative elements in a way that hampered its horror elements, while adjacent projects fell through altogether, lost in the debris of oblivion. This is when Dead Space burst into the scene in 2008, forever altering our relationship with immersion in high-intensity horror environments in space. Continued here

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How to Ask Great Questions     Asking questions is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards. But few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive. Continued here

S20

Israel-Gaza conflict: when social media fakes are rampant, news verification is vital     Acting director of the Reuters Insitute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford As news of Palestinian militant group Hamas launching a deadly attack on Israel and Israel’s threat of retaliation began to filter across news networks and social media platforms, a wave of misinformation and fake videos rose alongside. Continued here

S45

'Lies of P's Post-Credits Scene Is Just Absurd Enough to Work     Plenty of video games are based on unexpected things. From bug-catching inspiring Pokémon to the 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West’s take on the Chinese epic A Journey to the West, anything could be a video game. Yet a Soulsl-like inspired by Pinocchio, the premise of 2023’s Lies of P, still feels uniquely silly. While the game manages to pull this off, nothing will prepare players for the game’s even more absurd post-credits scene. But it all works. The second Lies of P was revealed to the world, it became the butt of a million jokes. It was an easy mark. “Developers will just make anything a Souls-like nowadays,” and, “Oh no, they made Pinocchio hot,” were two common examples of how people talked about the game before its release. Now that Lies of P is out, many have been shocked to discover that the dark take on Pinocchio manages to be one of the best non-FromSoftware Souls-likes ever made. Continued here

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You Need to Watch the Most Underrated Dystopian Thriller on Amazon Prime ASAP     Thanks to Loki, Tom Hiddleston has proven that he can act in any time period. 2012, Ancient Rome, even at the very end of time: his cool demeanor and British charm work in any context. But Hiddleston seems especially suited to period pieces. He’s almost got a James Dean-esque aura that makes his very presence feel nostalgic. That’s why he’s perfect in a retro environment like Loki’s TVA, and why he’s so great in a 2015 thriller now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. High-Rise, based on J. G. Ballard’s novel, follows Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston), a successful neurologist who moves into a massive high-rise purported to be a self-sustaining utopia by its architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons). But that’s not where the movie begins. Instead, it begins where it ends: with Laing roasting a dog’s leg. Continued here

S40

What Was Hamas Thinking?     Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, awoke Saturday morning to news of a bloodbath. Hamas’s military commanders, who are based in Gaza, had been so determined to keep secret their plan for a pre-dawn invasion of Israel that they’d hidden the details and the timing of the offensive even from the organization’s political leaders—including Abu Marzouk, who lives in exile in Doha, Qatar. He’d gone to sleep anticipating nothing, he told us, in a phone interview. “All of Hamas's leaders who are not military ones received the news early Saturday morning,” Abu Marzouk said. The claim was plausible: given the penetration of Israeli intelligence services and the surveillance typically surrounding exiled Hamas leaders, it would have been unwise to give Abu Marzouk foreknowledge of the assault.Hamas’s attack has introduced a dangerous new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas fighters and other militants gunned down more than twelve hundred Israelis—many of them civilians. And more than a hundred and fifty hostages were captured. The Israeli government has retaliated by cutting off food, fuel, and water to Gaza’s two million residents. The Israeli military has begun levelling entire neighborhoods with air strikes, causing nineteen hundred deaths so far, and tens of thousands of ground troops may soon be deployed on a mission to eliminate Hamas as an organization. Continued here

S41

An Intervention for My Friend Who's Done Too Much Therapy     We are staging this intervention to inform you that your work in therapy and your subsequently updated communication skills have made you a worse person to be around. This is a formal request for you to halt your "healing journey."Whether I was complaining about my on-again, off-again situationship or my bootlicking co-worker, you used to simply assure me that they were busted bozos—and I love a roast that sounds like something a cartoon villain might say. Continued here

S61

Research: How to Be a Better Ally to the LGBTQ+ Community     Some straight, cisgender people think of themselves as allies to the LGBTQ+ community, maybe even going so far as to self-designate as such through signage in their workspace or on their personal effects. But do LGBTQ+ individuals actually perceive them to be allies? To answer this question, the authors completed a four-year project to investigate how LGBTQ+ individuals determine whether someone is an ally. They conducted six studies, including thousands of LGBTQ+-identified participants across the U.S., to understand the causes and effects of allyship. Based on their findings, they present three ways to be a good ally to your LGBTQ+ colleagues — and not just perform allyship. Continued here

S21

Xi-Putin meeting: here's what it says about their current, and future, relationship     Vladimir Putin is expected to travel outside the borders of the former Soviet Union for the first time in 20 months to meet China’s Xi Jinping on October 17. The visit, if it happens, is likely to entrench a relationship in which Russia has become a useful tool in a broader Chinese strategy to consolidate its influence in Europe and the Americas.The occasion of Putin’s likely trip to Beijing is the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious Chinese project to expand global trade routes with other nations and extend transport and infrastructure links. Continued here

S31

Voice to Parliament referendum defeated: results at-a-glance     The referendum has been defeated, with a “no” majority called by the ABC in at least four states.The Constitution can only be changed if there is a double majority, meaning there must be a national majority of voters across all states and territories and a majority of voters in a majority of the states (at least four of the six states). The Northern Territory and ACT counts are not included in the majority of states, but do contribute to the overall national count. Continued here

S19

Forests v farmland: what the world would look like if we allocated all our land in the optimal way     What would the world look like if we could decide – globally and collectively – to allocate all our land in the optimal way? Where would we grow food and find water, and what areas would we leave to nature?It’s a radical suggestion that isn’t likely to ever happen. But a thought experiment like this provides an insight into the scale of transformation that may be required to maintain a healthy planet while adapting to a changing climate and a growing population. Continued here

S59

What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation     Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot). Continued here

S34

Was Dracula a Vegan, Really?     Last spring, the inventor Gleb Zilberstein and his wife, Svetlana, visited the Transylvanian city of Sibiu for three days to study the papers of Vlad III, also known as Vlad Ţepeş (the Impaler), a fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, who has come to be mistaken as the historical source for Count Dracula, from the novel by Bram Stoker. In the Sibiu city archives, Zilberstein, who is based in Israel, was pleased to find three letters written by Ţepeş some five hundred years ago, two of which were in pristine condition. Since 2012, Zilberstein has sought to collect traces of proteins from historical documents—the blood, sweat, and dietary habits of long-dead clerks and authors—which can then be analyzed in a mass spectrometer, sometimes with startling results. (I wrote about Zilberstein and his long-term collaborator, an Italian chemistry professor named Pier Giorgio Righetti, in 2018.) The night after Zilberstein began working on Ţepeş’s letters, there was a violent storm. “There was heavy rain and strong winds,” he told me in an e-mail. “Lightning flashed, dogs and some other animals howled. There was a great atmosphere to start our ‘gothic’ project.” The next morning was Thursday, May 26th, the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Stoker’s “Dracula.” The Zilbersteins went on a tour of Sibiu’s churches. “No supernatural phenomena as a reaction of the devil’s or vampire power appeared,” Zilberstein noted.Ţepeş and Dracula have been locked in an uncomfortable, non-consensual embrace for more than fifty years. In the early seventies, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, historians from Boston College, who were researching Ţepeş’s bloody life and rule, came upon Stoker’s research notes for “Dracula” in the Rosenbach Museum and Library, in Philadelphia. The notes had lain, unstudied, for decades as the vampire went global. Stoker was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London and friends with Oscar Wilde. He never visited Transylvania. But McNally and Florescu discovered that one of Stoker’s sources for the novel was “An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia,” by William Wilkinson, a one-time British diplomat in Bucharest, which he read on a visit to Whitby Public Library in the summer of 1890. Continued here

S26

Israel seems poised for a massive invasion of Gaza rather than prolonged attrition     In the days since the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas, Israel has counted its dead and secured its borders. The country now faces a grim choice. Will it continue trading air strikes and rocket fire with Hamas militants for a prolonged period? Or will it launch a ground invasion of Gaza that triggers more casualties among Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians while risking a two-front war? Continued here

S44

How A New Generation of Music Composers Changed Superhero Movies Forever     In the last decade, the sound of superhero movies became more atmospheric, more eclectic, and more punk rock. Here’s why.Henry Jackman still remembers the “renegade” film score that changed superhero movies forever. The year was 2010. The movie? Kick-Ass. Continued here

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Your Rainbow Logo Doesn't Make You an Ally     It’s time for companies to reconsider how they approach marketing and branding during Pride month. Many members of the LGBTQ+ community are tired of “rainbow capitalism,” “pink washing,” and other forms of performative corporate allyship. In this piece, author Lily Zheng suggests that companies consider retiring their rainbow logos next year, in favor of more meaningful actions that can actually improve the lives of LGBTQ+ communities. “The bar for approval from LGBTQ+ communities in 2021 has risen, and rainbow marketing just doesn’t cut it anymore. Let your actions between now and Pride 2022 demonstrate your commitment to the LGBTQ+ community, instead,” Zheng writes. Continued here

S37

Werner Herzog Defends His "Ecstatic" Approach to the Truth     The renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog has become known for many things: notoriously ambitious movies like "Fitzcarraldo" and "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"; his expansive documentaries; and his deep, mellifluous German accent, which he has used to great effect lately as an actor in productions like "Jack Reacher" and "The Mandalorian." But, according to Herzog himself, his fabulist work as his own biographer deserves just as much praise. "I keep saying facts do not illuminate us," Herzog tells David Remnick. "And that's my approach, that is beyond outside of facts." In a wide-ranging conversation, Herzog looks back on his career, his newfound success embracing the "self irony" of his persona, and why he avoided watching any of "Star Wars" until fairly recently. Plus, the Manila-based reporter Patricia Evangelista describes the horrors of Rodrigo Duterte's regime in the Philippines, and how they echo here in the U.S.The German filmmaking legend says the New York Times is simply "dazed and confused" when it comes to the veracity of his new memoir. Continued here

S32

The political subjugation of First Nations' peoples is no longer historical legacy     There has never been a decade without a significant Indigenous-led movement in Australia. These movements have centred on the reinstatement of Indigenous peoples’ rights as self-determining peoples, and demands for justice arising from our brutal dispossession and its contemporary fingerprints.There has never been a successful referendum without bipartisan support. Success for the Voice to Parliament was always going to be against the odds. Tonight, we saw results track recent polls with an overall Yes vote expected in the mid 40s nationally. With New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia called by 7:25pm, the referendum has failed. Continued here

S23

Cardinal Newman: pro-slavery views of prominent 19th-century cleric raise questions about his educational legacy     One of the comforting stories the British told themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries was that they were implacably opposed to slavery.Britons had decided “that the disgrace of slavery should not be suffered to remain part of our national system”, or so Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary at the moment of abolition, maintained. It was a claim willingly accepted by later generations. The 1833 Act that abolished slavery in Britain’s Atlantic empire reflected the undivided national will. Continued here

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Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century     Back in the 1990s, computer engineer and Wall Street “quant” were the hot occupations in business. Today data scientists are the hires firms are competing to make. As companies wrestle with unprecedented volumes and types of information, demand for these experts has raced well ahead of supply. Indeed, Greylock Partners, the VC firm that backed Facebook and LinkedIn, is so worried about the shortage of data scientists that it has a recruiting team dedicated to channeling them to the businesses in its portfolio. Continued here

S39

The Tangled Grief of Israel's Anti-Occupation Activists     On Saturday, October 7th, Avner Gvaryahu and his wife were awakened by an air-raid alarm. Their house in Tel Aviv doesn't have a safe room, so they huddled in a windowless corner of the house. Being awakened by a siren was distressing but by no means an unprecedented occurrence. Gvaryahu's wife is a journalist and nine months pregnant. Gvaryahu is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans that collects and disseminates testimonies on the cruelty and possible criminality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Both he and his wife are experts in finding and analyzing information. Still, it wasn't until about noon that they had learned enough about the Hamas attack on southern Israel to know that something extraordinary was happening.Gvaryahu drafted a statement based on what he knew so far, leading with the events of Saturday morning: "Hamas's attack and the events unfolding since yesterday are unspeakable. We are heartbroken to watch terrified civilians besieged in their homes, innocent people murdered in cold blood on the streets, at parties, and at home. Dozens taken hostage and dragged into the Gaza Strip. Every one of us knows someone who has been tragically affected." Then the tone of Gvaryahu's statement shifted: "We could go on and on about their cruel and criminal actions, or focus on how our Jewish-supremacist government brought us to this point. But, as hard as it is, our job as former Israeli soldiers is to talk about what we were sent to do." He framed the Hamas attack as a failure of the Israel Defense Forces, which, he wrote, were busy protecting settlers in the West Bank. "Our country decided—decades ago—that it's willing to forfeit the security of its citizens in our towns and cities, in favor of maintaining control over an occupied civilian population of millions, all for the sake of a settler-messianic agenda." It was time for Israelis to wake up to how unsustainable and unsafe that arrangement was. Continued here

S30

Voice to Parliament referendum is heavily defeated nationally and in majority of states     Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The Voice to Parliament referendum has failed convincingly after the ABC projected large victories for the “no” side in the national vote and in a majority of states tonight. Continued here

S22

Afghanistan earthquakes: Taliban interference in aid efforts is affecting disaster response     Over 1,000 people are thought to have been killed in the latest earthquake to hit Afghanistan. Humanitarian aid agencies are scrambling to help the affected villages. But the realities of Taliban rule are starting to have an impact on the ground, as relations between the authorities and NGOs fray.Two earthquakes struck Afghanistan’s western province of Herat on October 7 and a third on October 11. Zindajan district, 50km west of Herat, was the worst affected area. It is a rural area of scattered hamlets, where most people live in traditional single-storey mud-brick structures. In villages near the epicentre, the damage was total. Mud structures simply collapsed on their occupants. As the October 7 quakes occurred late in the morning, the victims were mainly women and children, who were indoors. Men working in the fields were spared. Continued here

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Trump's Only Real Worldview Is Pettiness     Let no one say that Donald Trump has lost his edge. His speech Wednesday evening, amid the roiling violence in the Gaza Strip, shows he’s still got it, whatever it is.In Florida, the former president and GOP presidential front-runner blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a supposed disagreement over a 2020 U.S. missile strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. “I’ll never forget,” Trump said. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing.” He went on to praise Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that is allied with Hamas and Iran. “You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart.” Continued here

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A Better, Fairer Approach to Layoffs     Today layoffs have become companies’ default response to the challenges created by advances in technology and global competition. Yet research shows that job cuts rarely help senior leaders achieve their goals. Too often, they’re done for short-term gain, but the cost savings are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation, which hurt profits in the long run. Continued here

S38

Drake's Era of Masculine Frustration     In 2019, Drake sat down in his Toronto home to record a rare, career-spanning interview with the journalists Elliott Wilson and Brian (B.Dot) Miller for their "Rap Radar" podcast. Much of the sprawling two-hour conversation was spent reflecting on Drake's early successes and the unconventional path that he took to dominance. When Drake started making music, he was both celebrated and dismissed for favoring the sounds of R. & B. over hip-hop, and for balancing swagger and vulnerability—a move that felt daring at the time, but that eventually became the standard in the world of radio rap. "To me, making music for girls is just the waviest thing you could do," Drake told the interviewers, making no apologies for his affection for R. & B. and his tendency toward openheartedness. "Of all the things people could say about me, I was never affected by the whole 'This is soft, this is emotional' or whatever. I guess I could just make music for dusty guys or whatever, but that's not what inspires me."Four years and three albums later, though, Drake no longer seems particularly interested in making the sort of soft, emotional music that connected with a more feminine sensibility. His most recent releases, "Her Loss" (a 2022 collaborative album with the Atlanta rapper 21 Savage) and, out just this past Friday, "For All the Dogs," are embittered documents of masculine frustration. Drake, perhaps the most influential and commercially successful artist of his generation besides Taylor Swift, has conquered all there is to conquer within music, but he sounds more dispirited than ever—even deadened. The record begins with the musician making a stony rebuttal to a woman who claimed that he should have treated her better. "Nope," he grunts. It seems particularly lonely at the top for the thirty-seven-year-old Drake, who telegraphs alienation in both his professional and romantic lives. Continued here

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Scientists can't agree on when the first animals evolved - our research hopes to end the debate     There are estimated to be nearly 8 million species of animals living today, making up the majority of Earth’s documented biodiversity and inhabiting almost all of its environments. However, for most of Earth’s history animals were completely absent. The date of the first animals marks a shift in the history of life on Earth. Of course, as animals ourselves, it’s also the story of our origins. Without animals, our planet would have been a very different world. Continued here

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From Nordic symbols to sledgehammer executions: Inside the Wagner Group's neo-pagan rituals     According to the Orthodox Eastern Church, the spirit of Wagner chief Evgeny Prigozhin now ought to have embarked in heaven or hell. The religion believes it takes 40 days after death for souls to reach their final destination, a threshold that the once hotdog seller reached on 1 October.Dozens of everyday Russians and fighters gathered in Moscow and several other Russian cities to mark the occasion, amid notable silence from officials and state media. Prigozhin, who died in a plane explosion weeks after having led the biggest mutiny Russian president Vladimir Putin has faced in his 22-year rule, is thought to be buried at Porokhovskoye cemetery in St-Petersburg. Continued here

S60

How to Write Better Emails at Work     Eight tips you can start using today. Continued here

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When Blind Hiring Advances DEI -- and When It Doesn't     As a decision-making strategy, “blind hiring” involves blocking evaluators from receiving potentially biasing information about a job candidate until after an evaluation of their application materials are complete. Most famously, the tactic was used to boost the hiring of women in orchestras by having people audition from behind a screen that concealed their gender. But there’s a body of research that’s been conducted since that 2000 study showing that, while the strategy is generally effective, there are situations in which it might not help you diversify your candidate pool. The author outlines this research, and suggests three questions you should ask in order to get the most out of a blind hiring approach. Continued here

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Empire building has always come at an economic cost for Russia - from the days of the czars to Putin's Ukraine invasion     President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has come at huge economic costs. By conservative estimates, the Russian economy has taken a US$67 billion annual hit as a result of war expenses and the effects of economic sanctions. In the early stages of the invasion, some analysts put the costs even higher, at $900 million per day.These war costs show no sign of abating. The newly released Russian government budget for 2024 calls for a 70% defense expenditure increase, an astonishing reallocation of precious resources for a war that some observers expected to last a week at most. Continued here

S46

NASA's Psyche Mission Launches to What May Be the Heart Of a Now-Dead Planet      This morning, a new NASA mission launched toward one of the Solar System’s strangest residents.Asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich object that may be a remnant of an ancient collision that rendered the heart of a now-dead planet bare. Or, it signals that the Solar System used to be more peculiar than once thought, with Psyche having grown out from a particularly metal-rich pocket. Astronomers don’t know much about this oddity in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a distance about three times farther than Earth is from the Sun. Continued here

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Osiris-Rex: Nasa reveals evidence of water and carbon in sample delivered to Earth from an asteroid     On September 24 this year, a Nasa capsule parachuted down to Earth carrying a precious cache of material grabbed from an asteroid. The space agency has now revealed images and a preliminary analysis of the space rocks it found after lifting the lid off that capsule.The mission to the asteroid was called Osiris-Rex, and in 2020, it collected a sample of material from the asteroid Bennu. Afterwards, it travelled back to Earth and released the capsule containing the rocks into our atmosphere three weeks ago. Continued here

S11

South Africa's 2022 census missed 31% of people - big data could help in future     University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA.No census is ever exact: as academics Tom Moultrie and Rob Dorrington at the University of Cape Town have noted previously: Continued here